* Revised as of 10 January 2000
Not to disregard my commentary on the VBA problem, for to do so may be to invite major problems, but to be totally fair, this version of WordPerfect has the potential of being as much a Windows word processing classic as WP5.1 is in the DOS world.
I've been using the program since 8 July (almost two months now). At the end of the first month I wrote, "Considering it's the initial release of the program, it's stable enough that I've been able to use it as my only word processing software for about a month now. That's really something considering I earn my living by writing and therefore need stability in the software I use. And that constant use is regardless of the fact that I also have WP 5.1 and 6.2 for DOS and 6.1 and 8 for Windows on my machine. All are running just fine, thanks." And all of that holds true today as it did when first I wrote it.
Furthermore, I wrote, "It's also fast. I've only got a Pentium I, 166 MHz machine with 128 Mb of RAM. Yet it sings along at much the same speed, as far as I can tell without stop watching it, as WP5.1 does on the same machine." And again, that's also true, except that I've now got a Pentium II, 350 MHz machine with 256 Kb of RAM.
I'm still, as I wrote a few weeks ago, going to leave reviews of Quattro Pro and Paradoxand Presentations to folks more expert in those areas than I.
My reason for this revisit to the WP9 review is because the first Service Pack is now available and sure enough, as I predicted, it's taken care of almost all of my negatives about the program.
For example, I wrote,
"1. Home, Home Up and Home, Home, Home Up, instead of taking you to the top of the document or the top of the document before any codes respectively, takes you to a totally blank area, apparently above the actual document. Only by hitting pg dn, pg up can you see your text again." Service Pack 1 reduced the amount of times that happens but not completely. Service Pack 2 appears not to have fixed this problem.
"2. Undelete sometimes allows hitting enter/return to restore a deletion and sometimes doesn't, thus necessitating use of mouse click." SP1 has fixed this. You can now hit return/enter to restore a deletion.
"3. The thesaurus is broken. It shows a numeric outline form but without the text. There are some work-arounds, but they disable peripherals such as your scanner. Also the thesaurus, when you do see it by using one of the work-arounds, turns out to be a children's thesaurus rather than the excellent, full-featured one we're used to from version 8 and earlier." The invisible text is fixed in SP1, but the children's version problem is not fixed yet. This very serious problem has been fixed as of Service Pack 2.
Mastering WordPerfect Office
2000 Mastering
WordPerfect Office 2000
by Alan Simpson and Celeste Robinson
Mastering WordPerfect Office 2000: Premium Edition by Alan Simpson
WordPerfect Office 2000 : The Official Guide by Alan Neibauer
Mastering WordPerfect 9 by Alan Simpson and Gordon McComb
Que's Special Edition Using WordPerfect 9 by Laura Acklen
WordPerfect Office 2000 Bible by Harris, Stephen Harris, Erwin Zijleman